Did you Get Lost in the Garden?

Propagating plants by cuttings is by far the most common way I propagate plants. When you take a cutting from a plant you are making an exact genetic duplicate of the original plant. Essentially it’s a clone. No you won’t see any George Lucas movies about plant propagation (I don’t even want to think about weeds using the Force. The…

Whenever you start to design an Edible Landscape/Garden it helps to have some inspiration to use as a guide.  You may have a ton of ideas in your head, but – trust me on this – sometimes those ideas don’t always work!  It’s never a bad idea to have some backup ideas or to just research those ideas to see…

Lately I’ve been working on getting everything up and running with my vegetable garden. I followed the raised bed layout I made and filled the beds several weeks ago. I’ve already planted lettuce, tomatoes, marigolds, peppers, beans, cucumbers, watermelon, catmint, and squash. In the picture to the right you can see the little cucumber sprouts popping up through the soil….

Things are growing very nicely in the vegetable garden. The tomatoes (which are our favorite crop no matter what else we try) are growing like crazy, the zucchini has almost produced it’s first zucchini, and the cabbage are …well…you’ll see… Here are two of my raised beds full of tomatoes. The bed on the left contains mostly Roma tomatoes while…

In our front yard is a triangular shaped area that for now I’m calling the Iris Garden.  In a week or so after the irises finish blooming I’ll have to change the name to something else but for now the Iris Garden works!  I actually began this garden area as a winter color garden but soon realized that winter color…

I’m a huge fan of mustard.  There are few snacks I enjoy more than pretzels dipped in a delicious honey mustard.  I love it on sandwiches and as an ingredient in all sorts of things from chicken dishes to potato salad. Mustard is simply awesome.  That’s my opinion anyway.  It’s also extremely easy to grow mustard in the garden. How…

You know the saying “If you don’t like the weather in {Insert your state here}, just wait a few minutes!” In the last two days, and possibly much of January, truer words could not be said about the weather here in Tennessee. Gray skies have been intermittent with occasional sun. The temperatures have been warm, rainy, and much more like…

The other day I mentioned that the Winter Jasmine would be the first thing to bloom… I was wrong! It’s the Witch hazel! It’s the first time it has bloomed in our garden. So what’s blooming in your February Garden?

One little seed starting trick I have in my bag of gardening tricks is to start seeds in plastic cup greenhouses!  I shared a picture of seed starting in my mini-greenhouses about 2 weeks ago on my Facebook page and I thought today I would share with you the progress of the seedlings. Plastic cups are an easy and effective…

It was springtime in 1999. The day was warm and the windows were open in my college apartment.  I was in my upstairs bedroom reading a book and had left the backdoor open to create a cross flow of air through the apartment.  Motion in my bedroom door caught my eye and the little tortoiseshell colored cat was walking into…

This past weekend was fantastic. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect for getting outdoors and getting things done. I was looking forward to Saturday and the perfect weather a week in advance and knew exactly what I was going to tackle. My plan: to work around the garden shed! I managed to accomplish one major task that needed done…

Since I’ve been doing posts on trees this past week for Arbor Day (April 25th) I thought I would take a second to talk about one threat to your trees, tent caterpillars (Malacosoma americanum). They are quite common in Tennessee and many other areas of the country. Watch out for these little caterpillars on your hardwood trees. Once they form…

What a weekend!  You don’t get weather like we had very often.  The thermometer hit the 70’s for the first time in a long while and we took advantage of it.  We spent very little time indoors, how could we?  After being cooped up in the house since fall any outside opportunity had to be taken. So what did we…

One morning back in September there was a heavy dew that illuminated this web on one of our potted lemon trees. We thought it was pretty cool so we took a picture of it!

You probably know rosemary as a fantastic herb for your garden. It’s great for seasoning chicken, fish, and (my personal favorite) used in an olive oil dip for bread; but what about in the garden as a landscape planting? I have two rosemary plants framing the front steps to our house. They help to define the entrance into the yard…

I had a very productive weekend! It’s been a while since I spent so much time outdoors and despite the heat, the sun, the sweat, and big case of farmer’s tan a bunch of chores were accomplished. One surprise though was my potatoes. The potato bed was overrun with Bermuda grass as I mentioned the other day but even before…

As you can see from the picture to the left that this tree has taken a beating. Last fall when the deer were out in force a buck decided to rut against several of my favorite trees. Coincidentally all the deer damaged trees were young trees that I had planted in the yard including two maples, a dogwood and one…

Last week I attended the Nashville Lawn and Garden Show.  I’ve been very busy planting seeds and getting the garden ready and I haven’t had a lot of time to post lately so I thought I would share a few short posts with your from the show that had some clever design ideas that you may want to consider for…